Dispatches from the front.

[lyssachan]

I am cleaning the upstairs so I can move myself up there. This is something I've been talking about for, no exaggeration, 6 years. Maybe more. I think it's depression more than anything that's been stopping me but whatever: the point is that I'm doing it now.

And it's going to take me a month and a half.

Comments

[moiread]

My mom is the same way, between having grown up with nothing and the fact that her parents both had depression-era values that they passed on to their kids, so I grew up in a house that sounds just like yours. I remember that my parents' basement used to be so full of my mom's random crap that, out of the whole entire basement, the only available space was a small path leading from the stairs to the laundry room. The path was about ten feet long and three feet wide. The entire rest of the full-size finished basement was filled up to my height with boxes of jun and rough totes of junk and just plan ol' free-standing junk. There were like old broken toys from when my brother and I were kids, and we hadn't been that age of "kids" in over ten years.

Once when we had relatives come to stay, my mom told me to "tidy the basement". I could really only stare at her. Eventually I went downstairs, cleared the little path of dirty laundry, and then taped up a hand-written note that said: Please keep your arms and legs inside the safe zone at all times. Do not feed the junk. Thank you, The Management. She didn't find out about it until after our guests had already seen it and boy was she angry.

Sometimes you just have to purge it. It sucks while you're doing it, but at the end people always seem to feel a lot better. So good for you for stepping up to the plate to deal with it. :3

My personal rule is that if I haven't used it in a year, it gets thrown out. The only exceptions to this are clothes I still fit into and just don't have occasion to wear (like fancy party things or goth apparel), or items that have a defined and guaranteed practical use in the near future (like a desk that I KNOW will be needed as soon as I'm living somewhere else and/or Kevin decides he wants this one back). And even then, sometimes I weigh the cost of buying a new one (if ever I should turn out to need it after all) against how obnoxious it is to store it indefinitely. (I've never really understood the "sentimental value" argument, so that's never really a factor for me. If the only time I feel sentimental about it is when I dig it out of the pile of junk again and see it and get misty-eyed, but for the last two years prior hadn't even thought about it ONCE, then it's not really a special thing. Better to grab one or two of the best ones and find them places where they can be seen every day and actually honour the memories involved, then turf the rest.)

[skycornerless]

I am a terrible, terrible packrat. I keep things because I want to be reminded of that event whenever I get ambitious and want to clean and go through my junk. My father called me last summer to inform me that he threw away a box of my stuff - papers, mostly, probably a lot of sheet music - that was in my brother's room (previously mine). I was upset! Because I didn't know what exactly it was! Obviously, I do not need those things, but they hold keys to memories that I'll otherwise let languish behind locked doors. (And I'm not saying they're particularly special memories, either, I just take a certain delight in remembering things I haven't thought about in eons, and having mementos from those times are really the only way to do that.)

(Also what if I take up music again?? I WOULD TOTALLY WANT THE SHEET MUSIC TO THOSE TERRIBLE CHORUS SONGS WE SANG.)

Anyway, he totally denies having done that now, but I know it's true.